Transience analysis of bursty traffic with erbium Doped Fiber Amplifiers

In this paper, we investigate experimentally the impact of optical amplifiers, namely Erbium Doped Fiber Amplifiers (EDFA) on Optical Burst Switching (OBS) networks, operating at 2.5 Gb/s (typical bit rate for current passive optical networks - PON). Bursts with 2¹² - 1 and 2¹⁶ - 1 pseudo random binary sequence (PRBS) were studied, with different idle times (from 2 mus to 80 mus). The use of traffic with variable idle time was assessed in order to evaluate the effect on the burst initial amplitude. We also analyzed the performance of the packet based system by measuring the Q factor at the receiver and concluded that the performance is not affected by the type of traffic (variable or fixed idle times).